Abstract
Advocates of traditional, agriculture-based models of sociopolitical evolution argue that the adoption of domesticates is requisite for developments such as sedentism, village life, ascribed status, hereditary leadership, and other features that underpin institutionalized political complexity. We counter in this essay with a well-documented suite of politically complex hunter-gatherer (CHG) societies that exhibit these same features, thereby demonstrating that reliance on agriculture per se—or any other specific food regime such as fishing—should be excised from explanations of emergent political complexity. Despite the failure of the agricentric model to account for a significant number of cases of institutionalized complexity, some of its architects remain entrenched in their disbelief and rigidly ignore the implications of CHG studies. By continuing to situate farming as foundational to everything complex, they perpetuate not only a story of human cultural evolution over the last 10,000 years that is incomplete but also a narrative that is incorrect. We reject subsistence (domesticates) as the central organizing principle and introduce here a new forum for thinking about how societies operate and evolve. We propose a model consisting of integrated platforms of societal dynamics that are inclusive (encourage discourse of all societies), nonprogressive, and serve as an organizational structure to discuss cultural evolution in any comparative or singular ethnographic context. The platforms are nonhierarchical and not fixed in order or importance. They are (1) agency and authority, (2) social differentiation, (3) participation in communal events, (4) organization of production, (5) labor obligations, (6) articulation of ecology and subsistence, and (7) territoriality and ownership. All sociopolitical cases and all topics can be productively discussed on these platforms, from bands to the largest empires, comparatively or diachronically. In the present article, we use the platforms to examine political evolution. We assemble considerable evidence that a variety of dietary regimes are associated with the emergence of institutionalized political complexity. Rather than diet, it is the ways people integrate and use labor that demands our attention.
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Notes
Also consulted but not cited here: Feder, K. L., & Park, M. A. (1993). Human Antiquity: An Introduction to Physical Anthropology and Archaeology. Mountain View, California: Mayfield; Robbins, R. (2012). Cultural Anthropology: A Problem-Based Approach (6th ed.). Belmont, California: Wadsworth.
Millions of copies of this book have been sold.
The post-contact case explored by Martindale (2006), while otherwise dissimilar from the cases we discuss, is illuminating regarding the pace of the political evolutionary process. Tsimshian households transformed in just a couple of generations from traditional extended family dwellings to nuclear family households corresponding to the introduction of market alternatives to traditional production and consumption practices. In their case, the introduction of European market economics fundamentally altered the prestige economy of the region, allowing monetary exchange to supplant the role of labor investment in obtaining prestigious potlatch gifts, especially coppers. Control over labor was still critical to traditional subsistence practices, even as the ritual system of potlatching was subverted. When it became possible to purchase food, the old order failed. Wolf (1999) points out that not only did basic social organization of the Tsimshian household change but also the labor investment in subsistence was transformed. It was not the change in subsistence practices themselves, but rather the change in the labor control and management that underpinned those systems that finally ended the old regime. Settlement locales shifted from those suited to salmon harvesting to others suited to fur hunting and participation in the European economy, as it expanded from prestige to subsistence practices on the Northwest Coast (Martindale 2006). During this relatively brief period, locals renegotiated ritual and sociopolitical structures that had existed for centuries. In the course of only a few generations, life on the Northwest Coast was transfigured.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Anna Prentiss and an anonymous reviewer for insightful suggestions that assisted in distilling our thinking. We also thank Dr. Prentiss for sharing current Fraser River data.
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The authors of this paper have no conflicts of interest.
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Arnold, J.E., Sunell, S., Nigra, B.T. et al. Entrenched Disbelief: Complex Hunter-Gatherers and the Case for Inclusive Cultural Evolutionary Thinking. J Archaeol Method Theory 23, 448–499 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-015-9246-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-015-9246-y